Let’s talk about spiders.

Spiders are great little creatures. Millions of people like spiders quite a bit. I like spiders. I’ve had a large huntsman’s spider in the corner of my bathroom for several years now. I don’t know what she eats – it’s not like there’s a lot of bugs in the bathroom! No, but seriously, they’re good for the environment, they help prevent global warming, and they’re a great alternative fuel source if you grind them into a fine powder and mix them with TangĀ® and shrew urine. I cannot back up any of these claims, however.

But that leads me to my real point: spider silk. Now that shit is bad ass. It’s so bad ass, in fact, that they’ve made movies about it. Have you maybe heard of a little movie called Spiderman? It’s about a boy who finds a bunch of spider silk and starts dressing up as a spider so he will have a reason to use it. Spider silk is seriously strong though. Its tensile strength is stronger than steel, and it’s extremely lightweight. You know I’ve read somewhere that if you were to take a line of silk long enough to wrap around the entire earth (which is like 70 or 90 miles) it would weigh less than sixteen ounces. Sixteen ounces! In other words, a little more than a pound.

So I got to thinking about all the cool shit you could do with some spider silk if you could just get hold of some of it. It’s a very rare substance, and typically only the rich can afford it, in small quantities. Though I’m betting it would be pretty rad to get enough of it that you could make a shirt or something. Of course that would probably run you a couple mil right there.

But we’ve all heard the theory that if you had a line of silk an inch thick, it could stop a 747 jet airliner in its tracks. Now see, here’s where I get confused. And I may need to research this a little, but I didn’t think jet airliners ran on tracks. I mean, I guess it could be air tracks or something. Maybe that’s what all those cables are for that I see stretched between wooden posts along the highway. I’ll get back to you on that.

You know how sticky spider silk is though? Have you ever been walking through a yard, like between trees, and run into a spider’s web? Well you probably didn’t know this, but spiders make their webs from silk. I’m not sure where they get the silk, but I have a plan for that. I’ll discuss it shortly. So if you have run into a spider’s web, you’ll know that it’s very sticky. It’s hard to get off of you. So if you had a silk shirt or something, I bet you’d have to cut it off when you got done wearing it, because it would be so sticky.

So here’s my plan for gathering a bunch of silk: since spiders always make their webs out of it, they must surely know where to find it. So find your favorite spider and follow him (or her) around for a couple of days until it takes you to its hidden stash. Once we find that, we can start mining or harvesting silk in mass quantities. Then we can start doing stuff like making clothes and 747 stoppers. Alternatively, you could just walk through a bunch of yards that have trees in them and tear down all the webs you see. Then you just wad them up into a ball and melt it. Take the spiders out first, so you can grind them up.

So there you have it. A ton of uses for spider silk. It’s apparently called “spider silk” because spiders use it a lot. But if we start finding a bunch of it and using it, maybe they’ll finally start calling it “human silk”. And that would be bad ass. I’ve (as you can see from my column) been researching silk and its mystical properties for many years. That’s why I know so much more about it than you. But that’s okay, just start gathering it and together we can take over the world. Silk is definitely something I could get wrapped up in. And you could too.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Spider silk come out the spiders ass. So I won’t be wearing no spider silk shirt or anything else made from spider shit.

  2. Stella

    That does sound like a great fuel alternative, Space. I just know how hard it is to find a shrew. Especially if you don’t believe in animals. haha

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